To better understand who we are, imagine that reality on Earth is made up of three layers: the blue sky, the clouds and the ground.
The ground is our physical reality where events unfold, and these are always external, objective happenings – meaning they’re the things we experience and the actions we take.
This could be anything from sitting in traffic on the way to work, going to dinner with friends, sitting in a meeting with a client, writing exams at school, starting a business, exploring a new city and so on – all the things that happen and make up our lives, filling the time within which we find ourselves existing.
In other words, it’s us living life and interacting with the world around us.
While we can control our actions and inputs as we participate in these events, it’s important to understand that we cannot control the outcome of these events, no matter how much we believe we can.
How things happen and unfold is dictated by a force greater than ourselves, something we have yet to fully comprehend or understand (and perhaps never will).
The second layer, the clouds, are our beliefs, thoughts and feelings that we experience continually throughout our lives and determine how we perceive the events that unfold around us.
The clouds is that voice in our head that narrates everything to us as we navigate through life, chattering away to itself incessantly.
Just like the events themselves, these beliefs, thoughts and emotions are objective – they are external to us – meaning they are not who we are.
Similar to how we know that we are not the car in which we drive, so too are we not the voice in our head.
Like clouds, these thoughts, feelings and sensations are temporary – they come and go with the wind that carries them, sometimes thick and grey, and sometimes wispy and light.
At times, they can even obscure the events that unfold on Earth but they do not dictate them. They attract them.
The third layer is the blue sky. The expansive and ever-present sky is who we truly are.
It is the essence that is always in the background, unaffected by the events that unfold on the ground and unaffected by the clouds that pass by, irrespective of how heavy and dark those clouds may be.
The sky is pure consciousness, that which exists simply by being and that is who we are too.
We are consciousness, we are the awareness that is aware of the clouds and of the events that unfold on Earth.
However, we spend most of our lives in the second layer – the clouds – believing that the incessant voice in our head is who we are. That the thoughts we think, are who we are. That the feelings we experience, are who we are. This then formulates our sense of self, perceiving ourselves to be intelligent, successful, weak, unworthy, creative or logical – whatever label we give ourselves based on how we think and feel about ourselves in relation to the events that unfold around us.
We latch onto whatever cloud that passes by, fully immersing ourselves in the story that it tells, instead of just letting it float away as the temporary entity it is.
We forget who we are because we get hypnotized by the cloud we live in.
Does the sky believe itself to be the clouds?
Do the clouds dictate whether the sky exists or not?
Do the clouds impact the colour of the sky?
Can the clouds exist without the sky?
No. The answer is always no.
Just like the clouds pass by as an external object to the sky, so do our thoughts and feelings.
And just like the clouds might sometimes create rain, so do our thoughts and feelings impact the experience we have with the events that unfold on Earth – not the events themselves, but rather the perception of them.
But neither the events nor the clouds are actually attached to who we are, they are objective things that occur in front of the background of who we are – consciousness.
We are the vast, ever-present blue sky that cannot be contained.
Questions to reflect on
